I am a great fan of Podcasts and thought it would be useful to list the main Tolkien Podcasts that are currently available. I am not including Lord of the Rings Online Podcasts.

I think most people on this site will know what a podcast is, but just in case it is an audio or video file that you can download to your computer or portable device and listen to. Most podcasts can be subscribed to using an application like iTunes and new episodes are automatically downloaded when they are published.

This Podcast has some interesting interviews mainly about the films but I have problems with the audio quality and have recently stopped listening. I am sure that the audio issues will be resolved and then I'll listen again.

Middle-earth Minutes is up to episode 7 and I was not a huge fan when it first started, as the presenter (Michael Kaiser) just read out news stories. That all changed in the last couple of episodes as Beren is now a regular guest on the show. This forum got a mention on the last episode as well.

Tolkien at Oxford

I can only find this through iTunes in the iTunes University (do a search for Tolkien at Oxford in iTunes).

Two episodes so far on Tolkien and Languages and Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary.

Michael Martinez and Hawke discuss news stories on this podcast. The episodes are often recorded a long time before they are released so a lot of the news events are often in the past. They also have not yet done a RSS feed for the episodes so you cannot subscribe using iTunes or a similar podcatcher and automatically get new episodes.

I have left the best Tolkien podcast to last. It has been quite quiet recently as Cory Olsen has not had time to devote to the extensive research which goes into each of his podcasts. The audio quality is also excellent on this podcast and at the moment if you were to listen to just one Tolkien podcast then I recommend this one.

Finally, I just thought that I would also mention my favourite podcast which is not Tolkien related.

I am also very interested in history and a superb podcast has been produced by Mike Duncan called The History of Rome. The amount of research put in to each episode is staggering and he has produced 78 episodes so far.

Also thanks from me for posting this list! I have been following the Tolkien Professor one (who by the way is now one of the staff at the Festival in the Shire Journal,) but was not aware of all of the others.